Apps for America: A Contest to Make Congress Accountable

Do you want to use the power of open APIs and mashups to help make the US Congress more accountable, interactive and transparent? If so, then you'll want to enter the new Apps for America Mashup Contest from the good folks at the Sunlight Foundation. Like last year's Mashup Congress contest, this is another notable competition from Sunlight, whose nonprofit mission is to help organizations use Internet technologies to make information about Congress and the federal government more accessible to the American people to create a "catalyst for greater political transparency and to foster more openness and accountability in government."

All software you write has to be licensed under the MIT, New BSD, or the GPL family of licenses.

Entries must be received by March 31, 2009. Winners will be announced on April 7th.

As with the Mashup Congress contest, there's lots of great opportunity for developers to create something both innovative and beneficial. Take for example last year's winner, Unfluence. Built using the API from Follow the Money it gets you more insight into the truth of campaign finance via an interactive network map of state level political contribution data (more at our Unfluence mashup profile).

[...] API is another notable step in making government data accessible to developers. Along with efforts by the Sunlight Foundation, Vivek Kundra in Washington D.C., and the UK government, more of these opportunities are [...]

[...] Congress Facebook is a new mashup combining 11 different web APIs that wants &#8220;to make Congress more accountable and transparent&#8221;. The app tracks a lot of data for each member: voting records, FEC reports, Campaign Finance summary, their opinions on the issues, and even their state&#8217;s federal spending reports. The design of the site is basic, but the it&#8217;s data rich. And among other things, it&#8217;s an entry in a contest we reported on last month Sunlight Labs&#8217; Apps for America contest. [...]